No Age

The Los Angeles experimental punk duo talk about how they broke out of a creative slump by deciding to not only write the music for their imminent new album, An Object, but to cut, print, box, stamp, and ship it themselves, too.

For the last eight hours, No Age guitarist Randy Randall has been watching video of himself and band mate Dean Spunt fold and stack 5,000 record covers. An ever-restless pair, Randall and Spunt decided that the packaging of their third proper album, An Object, would be handmade and self-assembled-- no matter the resources that their label Sub Pop has for tasks such as this. They filmed the whole process, and Randall’s been up most of the night, nursing his computer as it imports the mountain of data.

No Age needed this: After touring behind 2010’s Everything in Between, the band attempted to push itself through a writing slump the hard way-- writing, discarding, writing again, getting frustrated. Finally, Spunt realized that he wanted to make the record, not simply write and record the music it stored.

In turn, the effort that went into turning An Object into an object fueled the album’s 11 songs, convincing the band to revisit not only their songwriting process but also their instrumental approach. Randall broke down the parts of his tunes, working less to write the technically perfect rock song than simply to write compelling pieces of them; Spunt didn’t quit playing drums, but he began augmenting them with contact microphones and electric bass, using his hands to do something besides hold sticks.

An Object is No Age’s most curious and ponderous album to date. It boasts a handful of the band’s usual forward-facing and unapologetic rock numbers, such as taunting opener “No Ground” and the red-faced tantrum “Circling with Dizzy”. But its more meandering moments-- the beautifully lonely “Running from A-Go-Go” or the slowly unfolding “Commerce, Comment, Commence”-- showcase a band actively working to test its own limits as it nears the end of its first decade.

"If we could, we would go home with you, help you unwrap the record, put it on your stereo, and then cook you dinner and cuddle while you listen to it."

Pitchfork: How has your relationship evolved over the last 10 years, especially in terms of how it impacts the music you make?

Randy Randall: It’s not a very linear relationship-- it waxes and wanes and ebbs and flows. If you had to dance with the same person everyday, you’re not really a dancer. You’re just making it up as you go. We’re that: One person starts ballet dancing, and the other person starts tap dancing. At some points, they work together. At other points, one person is tapping all over the other person’s ballet slippers.

Pitchfork: When did you realize No Age would be together for the long haul?

RR: It was after we had our first fight, and we were still able to talk to each other. I’m always afraid of confrontation, so it was hard for me: “Oh, shit, we just had a fight. I think the band is broken up.” No, that’s just what people do when they care about what they’re working on.

Dean Spunt: The fight happened when we were on tour, so things were a bit tense. We were playing with Mika Miko in Nottingham and we showed up at noon and ended up playing at two in the morning. By the middle of the set, some guitars, mic stands, and fists flew. It was our last fistfight. We learned we weren’t that type of band.

RR: And I was wasted. Around noon that day, some kid from this band Lovvers asked me if I’d ever tried vodka and Diet Coke. I said, “No, that sounds disgusting.” He made one for me, and so 2 a.m. rolls around, and I had no idea what was going on.

DS: Every time we see that kid from Lovvers, he reminds us that was his favorite show.

Pitchfork: Your early EPs contain songs are very explosive and off-the-cuff, as though you were still figuring out your musical relationship. Were you?

DS: Those songs feel urgent because we really wanted to go out and show people what we’d made and meet like-minded people. They were recorded in a way that really showcased how naïve we were without instruments-- we had so much to say, but we weren’t skilled enough to say it all. That’s where the urgency comes from. I was pounding drums or playing samples or singing, but I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

RR: That’s the way you feel when you’re growing up: “Shit, I got a lot to say, but I don’t really know how to say it.” It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it had to be done.

Pitchfork: As songwriters and instrumentalists, how do you fight against complacency at this point?

DS: If you’re in a band, you spend your whole life trying not to work at a day job. I started in the band playing drums and singing, neither of which I knew how to do very well. Fast-forward eight years, and now that’s predominately what I do. I’m a professional rock’n’roll musician. That was never my intention, and I didn’t really think it all the way through.

It can start to feel like the office every day when you know what you’re doing, but I like experimenting and feeling vulnerable. On this record, specifically, I mess around with things other than drums. If all I’m doing is moving my hands on the percussion side of it, I could be doing that with contact microphones or a bass guitar or whatever. Bringing those elements in has made it a lot more interesting than just playing drums and singing.

I always had a love-hate relationship with drums. When I started playing, it was in response to this macho-ness that I felt drums had in hardcore or rock bands. My idea early on was to take someone who had no idea how to play drums and let them have this aggression. If they don’t know how to play, it will feel different because there’s all the intention but no skill at playing drums. As I’ve gotten better, I feel like I play beats that I wouldn’t have liked early on.

Pitchfork: Randy, do you feel the same way about your guitar?

RR: Playing guitar has always been a confusing nightmare; I feel like the more I play guitar, the less I really know about it. The longer I spend with an instrument, there’s stranger and deeper nuance to me. I started playing guitar out of this weird emotional breakdown as a kid. The first 10 years of playing guitar were a good excuse for me to beat myself up with an instrument on, but it wasn’t really musical.

Then I started messing around, making four-track tapes. I thought, “I want to learn how to fingerpick, like John Fahey. I wonder if I could do that?” Eight years later, I’m nowhere closer to knowing how to do anything like that. It’s not my goal to sound like John Fahey, but I just feel like guitar is an open landscape. The only limit is my imagination. I see it as a lifelong experiment. At the same time, I’m just as guilty as anyone else of falling into patterns. I like what I like. I become a cantankerous man at times. It’s not the guitar’s fault that it sounds that way. It’s my fault for playing it that way.

Pitchfork: When you experiment or make yourself vulnerable, you now have the pressure of doing it publicly, as a band many people like. Does that get to you?

DS: There is a bit of a pressure on us. Early on, we talked about the idea of making music that we wanted to hear while maintaining some level of success. I didn’t want to fuck it up too much. At this point, though, I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t make me fulfilled and happy and excited.

Pitchfork: You decided to take this record into your own hands by manufacturing as much of every CD and LP as possible. How did that happen?

DS: I don’t sit around and play music on guitar or drums around my house. To me, music is a medium that I chose-- or chose me, maybe-- to express myself. After Everything in Between, we were trying to write, and it was going nowhere. I started thinking about how to make a record and why I wasn’t able to make a record and why I wanted to make a record. It was a starting point for me.

RR: I said, “You’re crazy. I don’t want to fold a bunch of fucking records.”

DS: We kept talking about it, and eventually, Randy said, “Hell yeah, let’s do it.” We started writing music a little bit and recording it, and it went a lot faster after that.

Pitchfork: What did Sub Pop say?

RR: “You’re crazy!”

DS: Just like every record we’ve done, at first, they say, “Why do you guys want to make it so difficult?” The original idea was to make an unlimited edition, and we would continue to produce them until the end of time. But that would mean that if we were on tour, or something happened, we wouldn’t be able to produce the record, and it wouldn’t be in stores. But Sub Pop is in the business of selling records, so they’re not really into conceptual ideas of how to fuck with records as an object. So we decided to do a limited edition of 5,000 LPs and 5,000 CDs, which, in any sense, is not that limited. I wanted the number to be absurd, because the point was to see if we were able to do this thing. And we did it.

We physically made everything, cut everything, printed everything, boxed everything and shipped it to the printing plant. We couldn’t press the record ourselves because there is a lot of legal liability, and we’d have to get a job at the pressing plant, basically. We would if we had time, but we weren’t able to. We physically touched them all and stamped them and wrote on them and sweated on them.

RR: And now we will come to your town, and we will play these songs live to you. Then we will sit behind a table and physically sell you this record. We will take your money and put the record in your hand. If we could, we would go home with you, help you unwrap the record, put it on your stereo, and then cook you dinner and cuddle while you listen to it.

DS: What is the relationship with the consumer when they’re buying this thing made by the artist but that was meant to be produced by a factory? If this thing is on the shelf or in a store or online, it’s with thousands of other things that have never been touched by the artist who made it, or were never touched at all.

RR: The reality is that the majority of people who will probably hear this record are streaming it on YouTube or downloading it.

DS: And that’s OK. The process was more for us to work through it, to see what it means. We were writing music for a concept.

RR: The real inspiration was Ray Kroc’s book, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, which is about a man who pioneered fast food in this country and the world. The title of the book became a battle cry for us in the whole process. If at any point we felt we were doing a lot of work and felt tired, we would invoke the name of Ray Kroc and the title of the book-- how disgusting and inspiring and terrible, Grinding It Out: The No Age Story.

Pitchfork: How did the concept-- designing, manufacturing and building your own packaging-- change the writing and recording of the music?

RR: My response to Randy was, “I don’t know what the sound of making a record is.” Is it a mechanical-sounding thing? No.

With this record, we also broke down the shorthand that we’ve created: What I thought was benefiting us was doing us a disservice because we were fast-forwarding straight through the parts of writing songs. We lost the art of foreplay in our music-writing relationship. We had to get back to teasing things out to the part of an idea that’s not fully formed.

Some of the stuff on Everything in Between was my attempt at creating these parts that I thought advanced that idea of melody and composition. But what we respond to the most in playing and even listening to music is feeling, not theory. And chances are, the majority of people feel similarly. It’s a feeling, not how cool that chord change or progression was-- it’s not a game where you get more points for how many complicated chords you throw in a song. Knowing about chord structure and atonality did nothing for our feelings.

DS: I don’t want to learn about chords; I try to stay in the dark about how music is made.